[MPlayer-users] Disk usage in Mplayer and Mencoder

[Jean-Louis Debert]

Hi, 

I am wondering about seemingly high disk usage (the DVD, not the HD)
whenever I use Mplayer or Mencoder with -dvd  (that is, directly
from the DVD drive).
What leads me to saying this is that dvd drive accesses (as shown by
the LED on the device) seem to be pretty continuous with Mplayer/Mencoder
(looks like about 3-4 accesses per second) whereas they are _much_ more 
spaced (less than 1 access/sec) when reading the same dvd with ogle 
under linux) or DVD station (under Windows).
(this does not seem to be precise enough, but I don't quite know
how to measure it accurately ...)


I'm pretty sure that the problem is not in my driver (or Linux kernel)
because, at least with ogle, this behaviour does not show.
Please note that Mplayer (or Mencoder) runs fine anyway, but I was 
wondering if all these accesses were really good for the drive (it can
run pretty hot ...)

My configuration: Linux Mandrake 8.2 on an ABIT KT7 board with a Duron 650.
The MB has a VIA chipset (KT133) with VIA 82686A  (which supports up to
UDMA/66).
The DVD drive is an ACER 1040 (Pioneer 1040 OEM) and uses UDMA/33
as reported by /var/log/messages and /proc/ide/via
hdparm also reports that dma is active.


I tried to play with various values in -cache (from 512k to 64M), it always
works but no change at all in drive accesses.

Is there any switch that would tell Mplayer or Mencoder to read the input
on the DVD in user-configurable size chunks ?